The museum’s latest exhibition of the Spanish Golden Age painter focuses almost exclusively on his immersive graphical fidelity. One is reminded of the tragic modern compulsion to reduce divine chiaroscuro to a mere novelty.
In its bewildering insistence that Francisco de Zurbarán’s masterworks are notable primarily because they look genuinely three-dimensional, the National Gallery has adopted the curatorial posture of an adolescent marveling at a high-definition television screen; one is reminded of the profound spiritual vacuity that currently plagues our civic institutions. To stand before his 1627 masterpiece The Crucifixion and praise its volumetric lighting is a profound betrayal of the sublime. It cannot be coincidence that this linguistic flattening mirrors the aesthetic collapse seen in both the minor optical treatises of the 14th-century scholastic Theodoric of Freiberg and, quite distressingly, the computer-generated climax of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, where the sheer volume of visual data entirely obliterates the soul.
We are simply thrilled that a painter who died in 1664 has managed to achieve such a high frame rate and zero latency in his depiction of martyred saints.
The public will inevitably flock to Trafalgar Square, blissfully unaware that Zurbarán’s terrifying spiritual weight owes far more to the canonical gloom of Caravaggio than to whatever passing sensory amusements the museum's placards currently promise. The tragedy is that the paintings remain silent, enduring the indignity of being marketed to the masses as an analog amusement park ride.